Eduleadership

I enjoyed a brief discussion with Alfie Kohn on Twitter today about the appropriateness of merit pay for teachers. Kohn suggested that teachers who are motivated by merit pay are likely to be less intrinsically motivated, and are less likely to do the job well. Furthermore, he asserted that seeking more pay for doing a good job is a problematic mindset for educators, one that schools should not abide.

I should preface my argument by clarifying that I am not an advocate for any specific merit pay plan. The logistics and pragmatics of implementing such schemes tend to be enormously challenging, and the plans themselves are political minefields. However, I’m not ready to write off merit pay completely, especially at the macroeconomic level.

At the the heart of the controversy is the fallacy that teachers will work harder or somehow become more effective if offered merit pay. The vast majority of educators are working as hard as they can, doing the best job that they can, and they don’t need more money to motivate them to continue doing so. A salary increase is always welcome, but if you ask an educator if a $2,000 bonus would motivate them to teach better, they’ll likely laugh (or slap you) in your face. Kohn writes:

The premise of merit pay, and indeed of all rewards, is that people could be doing a better job but for some reason have decided to wait until it’s bribed out of them. This is as insulting as it is inaccurate. Dangling a reward in front of teachers or principals—”Here’s what you’ll get if things somehow improve”— does nothing to address the complex, systemic factors that are actually responsible for educational deficiencies. Pay-for-performance is an outgrowth of behaviorism, which is focused on individual organisms, not systems—and, true to its name, looks only at behaviors, not at reasons and motives and the people who have them.

Despite this fundamental flaw in the logic of merit pay at the individual level, there are a few things I like about the idea of merit pay, from an economic perspective. As Kohn says, we need to look at systems, and I think it’s at the systemic level where merit pay becomes most interesting (though also the most unworkable). While merit pay is ineffective in motivating educators to do a better job, I would argue that it has a major influence on who chooses to enter or remain in the education profession.

The disconnect between performance and compensation can be demoralizing even for the most committed and talented educators. Why? Isn’t the knowledge that you’re making the difference in the life of a child reward enough in itself? I’d like to think so, but personal experience suggests otherwise.

In my second or third year of teaching, as I was making my way up the learning curve, I had the frightening realization that I could, if I wanted to, be a mediocre teacher for the rest of my life, and no one – not my principal, not my co-workers, not my students’ low-income parents – would ever do anything about it. As long as I wasn’t terrible, I’d be left alone. Forever.

Of course, I didn’t want to be mediocre, but I also felt that accountability to myself for the well-being of my students was not enough. Why? Because if I can be mediocre and get away with it, my colleagues can, too. The more I looked around, the more I noticed that many of them had settled into a lifelong pattern of mediocrity. I didn’t consider this an option for myself, and found myself embarrassed to be part of a staff where mediocrity was tolerated.

Even if I’m doing a good job, knowing that my colleagues aren’t – and don’t have to – is insulting and demoralizing to me. I want to work with people who challenge me to be my best.

While the opportunity to earn merit pay would not solve this problem, it would at least acknowledge that the problem exists.

For educators who won’t settle for mediocrity among their co-workers, changing careers is always an option. Thousands of talented people leave education every year because they’re disgusted with the lack of effective means for addressing mediocrity. Sitting on a collaborative team with lazy and/or uninterested co-workers – even just one – is disheartening and frustrating. I doubt that my friends in the private sector, who regularly see colleagues promoted or fired based on their performance, suffer from this frustration.

When competent people become frustrated and demoralized and decide to leave, guess who’s left?
1. Great educators who are intrinsically motivated by the knowledge that they are making a difference and who can grit their teeth and tolerate mediocre colleagues, and
2. The mediocre educators who are extrinsically motivated by job security and minimal scrutiny of their performance.

If you are an excellent educator in a sea of mediocrity, what do you do? Close your door and teach. Model excellence for others. Set a high standard by your example. But what if that’s not enough? There is no room for those who insist on high performance for themselves and their peers. If you find yourself in this situation and you have a choice, you’ll leave.

How many people in private-sector employment would love to teach, but are disgusted by the lack of individual accountability? Perhaps merit pay would appeal to some, but the symbolism of merit pay would be more meaningful to many. The idea that there’s no link between individual contribution and individual consequences is offensive at a visceral level to many people.

Kohn says in his 2003 EdWeek article:

…I tell Fortune 500 executives (or at least those foolish enough to ask me) that the best formula for compensation is this: Pay people well, pay them fairly, and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. All pay-for-performance plans, of course, violate that last precept.

Again, I like this idea, but I must ask why Fortune 500 companies almost invariably pay for performance. They’ve found something that works, and we must find something that works, too (though it will likely be very different in public education).

I don’t think Kohn is wrong in his assertion that merit pay is, at the individual level, an insulting behaviorist fallacy. Merit pay doesn’t work, and I don’t support it. But I do think we need to do something, as a profession, to forge a credible link between performance and rewards of various types.

One interesting proposal I’ve heard from economists is to simply fire the bottom 5% of teachers every year. While that would be just as thorny to implement as merit pay (how do you determine who’s in the bottom 5%? Do we really want teachers competing for “not the worst”?), it would perhaps bypass many of the psychological problems with both our current system and merit pay proposals.

As a young teacher, if I had known that the bottom 5% of teachers in my school would be terminated come June, my problem would have been solved. Mediocrity would quickly be rooted out (except, perhaps, in schools with exceptionally high turnover and difficulty recruiting good teachers). I would know that my work mattered enough to be evaluated, and know that someone considered the well-being of our students important enough not to leave it up to individual discretion.

What was my solution? I became an administrator. It’s now my job to root out low and mediocre performance, to ensure that all of our students receive the education they deserve. But I certainly don’t think all good teachers should become administrators (and, in fact, I’m not sure the same problem of tolerated mediocrity doesn’t exist among principals). I respect teaching as a career and calling, and my respect for the profession leads me to wonder what we can do to attract and retain the best people. Developing some type of individual accountability for performance is, to me, an important part of this puzzle.

What do you think?